Taiwan Today

Taiwan has nearly 300,000 aborigines, who came to the island from the south hundreds of years ago. As Chinese settlers began arriving in big numbers some 500 years ago, the aborigines were pushed into the mountains and subsisted on a hunting economy. Times have changed. Wild ani­mals are growing scarce. Hunting has been banned. The government is helping aborigines to leave the higher elevations for lands that can be farmed and are closer to employment in bus­iness and industry. One of the model villages is at Wutai near Pingtung in the south. People of Haucha have been moved from an inaccessible mountain where they lived in caves and huts.

 

 

 

The new site of Haucha village is on slope land at 200 meters elevation. A road instead of a path reaches the outside world. To walk down the mountain used to take villagers five or six hours. Now their products can be trucked to the lowlands. Some 100 concrete houses were built by the people themselves with some help from the government. The village is out of the way of landslides. A ditch protects the area from runoff in heavy rainstorms. Haucha has almost everything it needs: school and telephone office. New bridge and road have ended isolation. A park is planned.

 

 

 

Life is improving for the aborigines of Haucha and elsewhere. Refrigerators and television sets are commonplace in these comfortable new homes. In a sense, the original settlers of Taiwan are equal and more than equal. They get guaranteed representation in legislative bodies and are the principal objectives of mobile med­ical units. Many of those who have come down to the plains are doing well in music, dance and other artistic pursuits. They also excel in athletics. Aborigine boys who had practiced with sticks and stones started the youth baseball craze in Taiwan. Miss Chi Cheng, who held several world records in the sprints, and C.K. Yang, who set a decathlon mark which has never been broken, are both from aborigine tribes.